Report on U.S. teacher prep skewers CSUF, Brandman

Teacher-training programs at Cal State Fullerton and Brandman University have received some of the lowest marks possible in a new national report intended to assess whether aspiring educators are being adequately prepared for the classroom.

All of the elementary and secondary training programs reviewed at Cal State Fullerton and Irvine-based Brandman University received zeros or one star out of four stars, according to the first-of-its-kind analysis by the advocacy group National Council on Teacher Quality in partnership with U.S. News & World Report magazine.

UC Irvine, the only other Orange County institution reviewed, received 31/2 stars for its undergraduate secondary program and two stars for its graduate secondary program. Graduate programs include post-baccalaureate credentialing programs and master's programs.

Cal State Fullerton has trained 8,400 teachers over the past five years.

“The whole ratings system is a game – it's not methodologically sound,” said Cal State Fullerton spokesman Christopher Bugbee. “We suggest this argument be moved to a discussion of real data.”

Tuesday's report gave three- and four-star ratings to just 9 percent of the 1,200 elementary and secondary programs reviewed nationally.

Students in the programs that were rated represent 99 percent of traditionally trained teachers, the report said.

Brandman said that one of the three programs for which it was assigned a rating – the undergraduate elementary program – does not exist and has never been offered.

“The report's methodology is flawed,” Christine Zeppos, dean of Brandman's College of Education, said in a statement. “The data is incomplete and overwhelmingly dependent on materials such as course descriptions and syllabi, rather than what the teacher candidate is learning and how they perform in a classroom setting.”

Deborah Lowe Vandell, dean of UC Irvine's School of Education, said that while the data had limitations, UCI faculty still planned to make use of it.

“What we want to do is to use this data in addition to all of the metrics we collect to improve our programs,” Vandell said.

‘An industry of mediocrity'

The report, which has been panned as being incomplete and non-authoritative, was designed to be provocative and to urge college officials to rethink what skills would-be educators need to be taught to thrive in the classrooms of today and tomorrow.

“Through an exhaustive and unprecedented examination of how these schools operate, the review finds they have become an industry of mediocrity, churning out first-year teachers with classroom management skills and content knowledge inadequate to thrive in classrooms” with ever-increasing ethnic and socioeconomic student diversity, the report's authors wrote.

“A vast majority of teacher preparation programs do not give aspiring teachers adequate return on their investment of time and tuition dollars,” the report said.

Among the researchers' findings:

Of the 239,000 students trained to be teachers each year, just 98,000 are hired. The report concluded that colleges are admitting too many students.

Only a quarter of education programs limit admission to students in the top half of their high school class. The others allow students who fared poorly in high school to train as teachers.

Three-quarters of teacher training programs do not train potential educators how to teach reading based on the latest research. Instead, future teachers are left to develop their own methods.

Only 7 percent of programs ensure student teachers are partnered with effective classroom teachers. Most often, a student teacher is placed into a classroom where a teacher is willing to have them, regardless of experience.

California was singled out in the report for its “disastrous” effort to push aspiring teachers into a two-part track in which they earn an undergraduate degree and then a teaching credential.

Although intended to improve the academic qualifications of teachers, the two-part track – introduced in 1970 – has made it “virtually impossible” for elementary teachers to have enough time to master the classroom skills they need, the report concluded.

Vandell noted that UC Irvine last year graduated its inaugural class of eight aspiring teachers from the university's new undergraduate Cal Teach program.

As more undergraduates emerge from Cal Teach, UCI researchers will be able to track them and assess whether their success rates are higher, Vandell said.

“I hope we'll expand our undergraduate program, but I also want us to continue the post-bac program,” Vandell said. “I believe we're best-served by having a strong system of multiple pathways” to becoming a teacher.

Limited cooperation

For its review, the National Council on Teacher Quality identified 18 standards for teacher preparation programs, such as instructing would-be educators how to implement new national curriculum guidelines known as the Common Core State Standards, how to teach non-native English speakers and how to manage classrooms.

Although the investigators requested tomes of information from education program officials, such as admission requirements, course syllabi, textbooks and graduate surveys, only 114 institutions chose to cooperate with the review.

UC Irvine's School of Education provided all of the information requested, Vandell said.

“Our school cooperated in the spirit of transparency, accountability and commitment to metrics,” Vandell said in a letter to UC Irvine colleagues.

Nationwide, about 700 institutions formally objected to the National Council on Teacher Quality's planned ratings; some told students not to cooperate with requests.

At schools that did not provide data, researchers asked students, bookstores and professors to share their course documents, reading lists and policies. In some cases, the council filed lawsuits to collect those documents.

Bugbee of Cal State Fullerton said the university provided only course syllabi to the study's researchers. The California State University system expressed concerns from the outset that the analysis would be “unreliable and problematic,” Bugbee said.

Cal State schools have been collecting “valid, reliable evidence” on their teacher preparation programs since 2001, Cal State Fullerton says on its website.

Claire Cavallaro, dean of Cal State Fullerton's College of Education, said many of the report's conclusions were based on outdated, surface-level data.

Cavallaro said, for example, that while the vast majority of teacher training programs nationwide were accused of inadequately preparing students to teach the Common Core State Standards, the standards were still being developed at the time the report's researchers were gathering their data.

Detailed information about how to implement the standards in California was just released two months ago, Cavallaro said.

“This is something that is in the process right now, so to say we're not implementing it simply couldn't be true,” Cavallaro said. “If you were to ask superintendents and principals in Orange County about the quality of teachers that are prepared at Cal State Fullerton and other CSU campuses, they would tell you the level of preparation is very high and they are very much aware of the quality of our graduates.”